FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s Bayer expects a campaign to accelerate the pace of new discoveries of ingredients for pharmaceuticals and pesticides to yield results as early as 2016, a management board member said.

“We expect it to be reflected in our pipeline in the next two, three, four, five years,” Wolfgang Plischke, Bayer’s outgoing innovation chief, told Reuters in an interview.

Under the project named Nimbus, announced in 2012, Bayer’s human and animal health businesses as well as its CropScience division are being tied together more closely and hundreds of Bayer researchers are encouraged to exchange information that could help in the discovery of new ingredients.

Bayer hopes the project will give it an edge over rivals such as Sanofi, Pfizer or Syngenta, which do not have all three business areas under one roof.

Bayer has said in the past it plans to provide up to 30 million euros ($41.3 million) per year to finance the Nimbus project. It spent an overall 3.01 billion euros on research in 2012, up from 2.9 billion in 2011.

“Our philosophy is to have similar research budgets for the coming years,” Plischke said.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s Bayer expects a campaign to accelerate the pace of new discoveries of ingredients for pharmaceuticals and pesticides to yield results as early as 2016, a management board member said.

“We expect it to be reflected in our pipeline in the next two, three, four, five years,” Wolfgang Plischke, Bayer’s outgoing innovation chief, told Reuters in an interview.

Under the project named Nimbus, announced in 2012, Bayer’s human and animal health businesses as well as its CropScience division are being tied together more closely and hundreds of Bayer researchers are encouraged to exchange information that could help in the discovery of new ingredients.

Bayer hopes the project will give it an edge over rivals such as Sanofi, Pfizer or Syngenta, which do not have all three business areas under one roof.

Bayer has said in the past it plans to provide up to 30 million euros ($41.3 million) per year to finance the Nimbus project. It spent an overall 3.01 billion euros on research in 2012, up from 2.9 billion in 2011.

“Our philosophy is to have similar research budgets for the coming years,” Plischke said.

Yet another large drugmaker has made a commitment to release clinical trial data. The latest to do so is Sanofi, which will join an effort begun last year by GlaxoSmithKline to establish a web site where researchers can request study information.

In announcing its decision, Sanofi also expressed support for a data sharing plan declared last summer by the pharmaceutical industry trade groups in the US and Europe, which want to offer an alternative to a more sweeping proposal being considered by the European Medicines Agency (read here and here).

“Finding new therapies can be accelerated by fully sharing the successful and unsuccessful research results with other researchers. Data sharing helps to reduce duplication and allows researchers to build more effectively on the findings of other researchers,” says Sanofi ceo Chris Viehbacher, who is also president of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, in astatement.

Whether the gesture will satisfy industry critics remains to be seen. Sanofi will make available trial data and related documents, including clinical study reports, for studies in human that were submitted to US and European regulators and the product must have been approved by both agencies – on or after January 1, 2014.

And for the Sanofi Pasteur vaccine division, the requested studies must have been submitted to either regulator and the product must have been approved on or after the same date. Although the drugmaker says it will continue to submit for publication the results from all company-sponsored clinical studies, regardless of the study outcome, trial data for older prescription drugs and vaccines will not be made available to researchers.

Companies are actively, aggressively targeting you using your own personal data, without your knowledge or permission.

That’s not good for your privacy, but it’s hardly news – except when it’s the healthcare industry.

Yesterday, news broke that healthcare companies are identifying all manner of pertinent medical details about you without setting eyes on your medical chart. How? Personal habits – all gleaned online and aggregated into detailed, invasive profiles using data mining algorithms.

The news is alarming: Big Pharma companies figuring out what patients might be interested in an obesity drug based on clues that imply a couch-potato existence, others finding participants for a study using clues based on data mining, people getting called at home by medical telemarketers who know more than a few sensitive details about their health.

Is it a violation of HIPAA? Amazingly, no – all of these very personal details are inferred based on probability (likely accurate but probability nonetheless), not by talking to your doctor illegally. Yet it’s clearly an overstep into an ethically gray area. And that’s why the question of consumer protection is one that should weigh heavily on everyone’s minds.

Right now, it’s recruiting patients for a drug study that one could argue might help that person and countless others.